Guild Wars 2

Just wait till you get to higher levels… Instead of worrying about which element to be in, you’ll spend time frustrated that the cooldowns on the element swapping is “soooooo long” (and with arcane traits it drops it quite a bit, I think you can get your CD on element swapping down to like only 6 or 7 seconds, at least that’s what mine is at). I get in, drop my skills, swap, do the same, swap, etc… and by the time I’ve cycled through I have a second or two left to wait till I can start over…. soooo frustrating

Also, as you get higher up, you’ll learn that ele’s shine best when they’re focused on dropping aoe boons and buffs on self and team… that’s where we really stand out, stacking might and fury, aura’s, etc.

@Albane… lol, that’s going to be my my new quote in my sig

consider running a s/d build until you can start getting some trait points and learning how to use auras/element swaps/and blast finishers to really stack those boons and buff yourself and teammates… ele becomes amazing after about lvl 50 or 60 for the sake of your trait lines.

Until then, give yourself extra traits towards healing and toughness for survivability and just grind it out for a while. Ele was hard for me between about lvl’s 10 and 30, after that I started to figure it out… and now it’s just plain nasty if played right. Also, the longer you play, you can start inching out of the toughness and vitality trait lines and going for more power as you get better. I run a 10/10/10/10/30 build for dungeons and basically have perma swiftness and fury, and during fights can easily maintain 8 or so boons during entire fights, including maintaining between 15 and 25 stacks of might on myself and the whole team. Focus on boons and buffs and your ele will shine. If you ever get in a dungeon group with another ele who knows how to stack boons too, the rest of your group will be surprised at how easy it was this go around… you and the other ele will just smile quietly to yourselves and know that those rangers and warriors have no idea how much better we make the game for everyone else.

Also, consider investing in a good gaming mouse, I use a Razer Naga, although it’s a little overkill, I do use 9 of the 12 thumb buttons for attunement swaps and my 5 – 10 skills.

Tough these first couple levels out, I promise it’ll be worth it!!! ele requires a lot more thought than the standard “just smash A” playstyle of my warrior or ranger, but once you figure it out you won’t go back.

the idea is you open with a combo field, and then launch a skill within it for a combo finisher…

for instance, say you’re a d/d ele.

You open with ring of fire, which is an opener. Swap to earth quickly and lay down churning earth. That is called a blast finisher and gives might to yourself and your whole team.

Through these combos is how you will become most effective as an ele. You’ll start to see other ele’s, like say a staff ele, lay down other openers like healing rain and you’ll learn to use your finishers inside those openers. This is how we can stack might all over our team, heal the whole team. Most other classes (and even a lot of ele players who have them as alts) don’t understand just how much we are able to do to buff our team, and without sacrificing much damage or health of our own.

Ele was whined on constantly for being either “underpowered” or “squishy” until we all learned what our secret is… boons… For PvE and especially dungeons I run a 10/10/10/10/30 build and it’s all about boons. As ele’s we can maintain perma swiftness and fury (which means after sigil’s I’m holding like 75% crit chance at all times), we can easily get 25 stacks of might on ourselves and get at least 15-20 on the rest of our team. And once all that adds up we hit pretty kitten hard too.

Since they’ve somewhat nerfed the Evasive Arcana blast finishers in the 11/15 update, I’m thinking of changing to a 10/20/10/10/20 build and up crit chance to 85% with perma fury. We are the most party-centered and versatile class if played correctly, and we make everyone else look good without sacrificing our own damage done… Sadly, some of the other classes are too “just smash A” to realize they’re hitting so hard thanks to us, not to their “amazing” skill. We’re like the offensive line of the football team, a lot of people just won’t recognize how good we make it for everyone else. I couldn’t care less, gives me some satisfaction to look up and see all that might on my whole party and know that it was me. I also love it when other classes ask me how I have like 10 boons on me all the time

…just don’t no one tell anet, we don’t need no stinking nerf. The last thing we need is ele somehow becoming the next ranger.

Do AC Explore path 1/2/3 once each day for 6 days and you have your AC armor (I recommend the power/toughness/vitality armor for WvW, but whatever you want depending on how you play). Less then a week of grinding about 1.5 hours a day is not really that grindy. Use the www.gw2lfg.com website, you’ll find groups quickly and learn the paths pretty fast too. Also, running dungeons is the quickest way to make gold, so by the time you have your exotic AC armor, you’ll have enough gold saved up to buy superior runes, jewelry and trinkets for the extra punch.

Next is finding the right build, your WvW build will be similar to your PvP build, but there are differences, you never have 20 guys target you at once in PvP, but as an ele that’ll happen against a good team in WvW, they’ll come after you quickly to make sure you’re not dropping boons on your teammates. PvP for me is a lot more 1v1 situations, WvW isn’t, so play around with builds and enjoy I love WvW

definitely up your arcane and healing in WvW. Also, consider grinding through AC Dungeon for a while to get AC armor, specced to power/vitality/toughness. I run a 10/10/10/10/30 build for PvE which gives me pretty much perma might/fury/swiftness (although I’m think if switching to a 10/20/10/10/20 since not all Evasive Arcana’s are blast finishers anymore thanks to the nerf on 11/15). With perma fury and my runes on boon duration, keeping perma fury and maintaining 12-20 stacks of might on myself and team means I’m at about 85% crit chance at all times, this is far more devastating than a few paltry points more in the power trait line. On WvW, if I’m ganking I’ve tweaked around a lot, but I run pretty much the same as my pve build, although a little extra in water and less in arcane so I can still stack boons, but my heals are better (especially now that you can switch to water and heal while in mist form) if you’re in a good guild party, then focus on dropping those boons in on your team and getting out safely with mist form when you need to. I’m in d/d almost exclusively, although I’ve got an exotic staff in the bag when we come up on those keeps.

@Rannug, I followed the same path, my Ranger (first profession) levelled quickly, mainly because I went for 100% map completion with this character, and that’s quick. On the other hand my ele (second profession, and by far the one I love the most) is only at about 50% map completion, took a little longer to level because I focused less on map completion and more on WvW and dungeons at that point. But I definitely think map completion is the fastest way to level, dungeons are second.

So I’d probably still been getting a few extra stacks of might from the earth EA blast finisher (I would also think the EA in fire attunement would work too, but I haven’t had time to play since I posted this, so I’ll try to test it out this weekend), but I may step up to 20 air as well. I’d still be able to maintain perma-fury and it’d up me to 85% crit chance, so even a paltry 15 stacks of might, it could be a better deal.

thanks then, I’ll play around with a few things and see how I can best change my opening attack chains up.

so, being that I rarely read the updates, I’d been noticing I’m stacking more like 15-17 stacks of might these days instead of 22-25. I was reading through some updates and I’ve learned that on the 11/15 update, evasive arcana no longer triggers “unintentional” blast finishers.

What does “unintentional” mean? Couldn’t they just say that it no longer triggers finishers?

If that’s so, I’m considering dropping back to 20 in arcane and putting the other 10 in either power or precision… any thoughts from anyone else?

I’ve got good boon duration from runes anyway, so perhaps a slight increase to power thanks to this nerf may be in the cards… thoughts?

here’s the thread i mentioned

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Why-is-AC-more-broken-than-ever/first#post1034797

I keep reading about Detha bugs, on the gravelings or on those oozes that pop up right before the final room, but never experienced it myself. Almost every run I’ve done path 2 it’s the standard party debate over whether you kill kohler or not, and then run the rest of the way to the graveling/chain traps part. I’ve found that the npc usually follows one specific party member, usually the party leader, so perhaps the party leader is not getting to the right part of the room to trigger next cutscene??? I know that’s a “duh” answer, but something it’s the right one.

I know this problem was brought up in a previous thread and a dev has actually responded (rarer on the forums than I would like, but I’m sure they’re too busy to answer everyone). I’d search around the forums for other detha bug threads, I can’t remember where the thread I read was, but if I find it I’ll link it. They did say they were working on it though.

if you’ve got storage room I’d hang on to them, I bet anet finds a way to make them useful eventually, and you may be sorry if you sold a bunch for a few silver each if what elderan above suggests may happen (or something similar)

explore to 100% until lvl 35.

At lvl 35 start doing dungeons. You get 70% towards next lvl upon path completion, plus the extra experience during the dungeon path, plus a great way to get gold, plus you can start saving those tokens for exotic gear. Once you learn dungeon paths you’ll fly through AC path 1,2,3 with a good group in about an hour and a half and go up 3 or 4 levels, and probably also bank about 2-3 gold depending on how much of the dungeon you complete on each path.

I guess crafting is another option, but crafting from lvl 0 – 400 only nets you 10 levels per discipline, so if you started at lvl 0 and max crafted all 8 disciplines, you would be lvl 80. That would probably cost you about 25 – 30 gold at least, so in my mind crafting is a dumb way to level. Frankly, crafting is dumb period… way too expensive or time consuming, and it’s much cheaper to just buy stuff from the trading post then to get characters leveled to 400 in each discipline… unless of course you have multiple characters, then I guess it is kind of nice to be able to craft gear for multiple characters.

I remember running a group of 8 hero’s. I loved it when they added the option that you could use your own alt characters as hero’s. You could also control their skills… it was amazing, you were playing all 8 characters, spamming the skills you wanted. awesome…

…awesome for a single player game of course. Reminded me of the KOTOR series, where you controlled everyone (except in KOTOR of course you could switch point of view onto those alt characters). I agree, it took away from the “mmo” experience. It got to the point where the only time I ever partied with other real people was on dungeon runs or pvp/gvg.

I’m with you in that some of us aren’t in college anymore and have real world responsibilities that limit our play time to an hour or two at most at a time, so it’d be nice to do some of the end-game’esque stuff solo, but part of me wonders if it would do more damage than good. Since every GW2 player thinks they’re better then everyone else, I think you’d start seeing more and more people running hero groups than grouping with live people. I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing, but it’s probably something anet is trying to avoid.

I do miss partying in our guild hall in GW1.

They could add it like a dungeon instance, maybe in LA. Like entering the vigil keep or something, where the door is accessible to everyone, but the hall you end up entering is for whatever guild your in, or whatever guild the leader of the party is in.

I know part of the lore in GW2 is how the guild wars ravaged and destroyed (or almost did) the human race, so I assume that lore explains why there’s no more GvG (unless you build your sPvP teams from your guild, which most do). But some mini-game stuff would be fun, and a place to congregate as a guild is nice too. I’m also dying for a 1v1 pvp option.

I for one like the stuff in GW2 that isn’t necessarily about leveling and maxing stats occasionally. It’d be nice. Also, the guild hall was a great common place to just quickly map to to hit storage or something in GW1, I miss having that one “home base” that one could always get to. (now a days I map to a borderlands and take an asura gate to LA).

gw1 had an lfg option. you had to be in the town you were all starting from for the dungeon, quest, etc, but it helped a lot and cut down on the lfg spams in map chat… allbeit I don’t think they added it until the last year or two I played (in anticipation of GW2 of course I got more active trying to stack my hall of monuments). I think anet will get there, in the meantime gw2lfg.com is a great option. Give it a try. you don’t need to post your name, just look for someone who has and get back in game and whisper them if there’s a spot still open.

I’ve never had that problem healing others, but as an ele I can jump in, stack some good dps conditions, and then get out and get others up, so perhaps that’s why.

been using the site for a few weeks now. I don’t think i’ve ever waited longer then 5 minutes to get a group, and it’s usually people who know what they’re doing, so it makes the runs faster also.

I was about to start a thread about this, and I realized that not only someone had done it, but anet was cool enough to make this a sitcky. good for you anet !! now let’s just get a lfg built into the game, and it’ll be perfect.

www.gw2lfg.com

you can almost always find cross server groups. Until Anet adds a lfg option, it’s the best. I never have trouble finding a group within 5 minutes for any dungeon, and you can always specify if you’re doing a speed run or not, experienced players, or noobs trying to learn the dungeon. give it a shot, once I discovered it, I use it every single time I want to run a dungeon

when the goal for most people is getting their 60 per path each day, then speed runs are always going to be an option. Check gw2lfg.com and when you post your looking for a group, post the phrase “gold run”or “gold farm.” This will let your partners know you’re looking for a group that’s going to do a lot more killing than skipping. Like the age-old AC question, to kill Kohler or not to kill Kohler.

the only time to hit crystals is if you go down, it’s a few quick hits on one to rally

the only nerf I think is reasonable was addressed above, the radius of the screech, and even that I would be perfectly happy if they left it alone. If something can be easily beat with a pug group, or with a guild group when some aren’t lvl 80’s yet, or even some that have never done the dungeon, then why does it need nerfed? Personally I think all the end bosses in AC are plenty easy enough.

I had that problem until I discovered the website listed above. Until Anet adds a LFG function, the gw2lfg.com website is awesome. I have no problem finding groups in just a few minutes, and because it’s cross-server, for dungeons like CoF and Arah, someone is usually bound to have the dungeon open.

give it a shot, you’ll never spam “lfg” in map chat again

am I the only person who’s been playing since day one and never gotten a precursor drop?

regarding “message suppression”

I’ve been able to log out and switch characters and get new messages out, but I cannot log out and back in on the same character, message still suppressed.

I’m only r7 in PvP so I probably don’t have a lot of room to talk, but a few insights from someone just leaving the “noob” phase…

I do feel that pvp caters to bunker builds, but why not? It’s about taking, and more importantly holding points. Two solid bunker-build teams against each other, it becomes a fight to “who get’s the point first.” A good bunker guardian can at least keep the other team from capping a point, so if your team got it first, even if they only get 3 or 4 points towards their score early on, it can make the difference.

I would love to see tPvP an 8v8 instead of 5v5 personally. While I don’t feel any class is OP in PvP, I do think some of the bunker builds just can’t get brought down unless the whole team is there to do it, and that’s painful to leave the other two posts just to kill one guy, who’ll respawn and be right back 20 seconds later.

Other than that, I’ve enjoyed tPvP a lot. I play mostly d/d ele and mesmer, my d/d ele can sometimes hold a point against 3 or 4, that’s awesome, because that means the rest of my team can get the other two points before I die. Other times, a single player cuts through me like butter. It’s all about experience, and every time I play I see something else in another class and just learn how to counter that.

I don’t think things should be nerfed just to encourage more pve’ers and wvw’ers to come play pvp. There should be a learning curve, especially in tourney play. There should also be an understanding that bringing your pve skills to a pvp tourney, you should get smashed. My guild is primarily a wvw guild, but we’ve been putting pvp teams together more and more. Teamchat on raidcall has consisted, not of complaining about OP teams, but instead of how we can make our team better to be more competitive. We’ve placed 3rd and 4th consistently in every tourney we’ve played, but it will require more experience, communication and most importantly a willingness to not only play, but really learn other professions if we want to be successful.

My personal opinion, the best teams for a 5 man pvp tourney is two guardians, two mesmers and a dps roamer with speed buffs, like my d/d ele or a thief.

do your daily and monthly (duh). WvWvW is great (duh). Both of those have been mentioned. I also find farming karma in Cursed Shore (harder to find a group than Straits) or Straits of Devastation is great. I do Straits for about half an hour to an hour a day. There’s an almost immediately respawning chain of 8 events that runs south to north starting just south west of the Rally Waypoint at the chopper event and it takes about 20 minutes (depending on zerg size) to do all 8 (I can’t remember right now, but somewhere between 300 to 500 karma each)… then start again. Also, about every 2 hours the Balthazar temple opens up again which is nice Karma and you can buy Obby Shards once completed for 2.1k karma each (there’s usually a commander in Straits who will organize what is needed to take the Balth temple, listen to the commander, there are bugs there and if you screw something up it’ll be hours again before you can start). I also prefer it when there’s only about 10 or so in the zerg (as opposed to 30) because you’ll also get much better drops.

I can usually farm about 1g and 12 – 15k karma in an hour or two. I’m sure there are faster ways out there, but sometimes you can’t find a good WvW group, so this is a good backup.

If you don’t know the route, just map into Straits and mapchat “where’s zerg” and ask for a waypoint and find the group. Follow for a while and you’ll learn the route.

I PvP mainly D/D or S/D ele. I used to hate mesmers, so I made one That helped a lot. I have a lvl 60 mesmer still in PvE, but what it’s taught me is how to keep an eye on the mesmer itself and not get sidetracked by clones, where the mesmer goes when different clones are spawned. Arcane shield is also nice to keep in your back pocket when the mes does decide to send all those clones at you.

If you keep an eye on the mes themselves, it eliminates the “confusion by clones” effect. And mesmers are pretty squishy if you can get through retribution and their clones and stay on them.

I’d say 1v1 a mesmer is much easier to take down than 2v2 or more, the more people on screen, the harder it is to keep track of the mes themselves and can get more sidetracked by clones.

fixed… thank you

it won’t even let me open the client though… when I try to open I get an error message that states the following…

Unable to Open Archive File

Guild Wars 2 is unable to access its archive file local.dat. Please verify that this file is accessible and writeable and that no other program is currently using it.

so my secondary hard drive died recently. fortunately GW2 is on my primary hard drive… unfortunately however, the “local.dat” file must have been on my secondary drive (where I’ve moved all my personal files to, or had, before it died). While waiting for my new hard drive I figured, hey at least I can still play GW2… apparently that’s not the case.

Do I need to reinstall the client to get it to reset or can I just fix this somehow?

I’m lvl 39 and loving my mesmer. I have a lvl 80 ranger (yawn) and lvl 80 ele (freakin’ awesome). I use a staff and sword-torch and have no problem with just about any group PvE and any solo up to about 5 or 6 levels above mine, including veterans. Stack conditions, use your F2 shatter as often as you can and keep as many phantasms/clones out as possible during the whole fight. Like my ele, I find I rarely use my auto-attack skills.

Remember, misdirection

my ele has good survivability in WvW. I have maxed states on precision, vitality and 10 into arcane. Thanks to runes/sigils and some lucky excellent gold dropped weps I still have the power I want for my primarily-used D/D wep set (which hits hard anyway). But maxing out your vitality, you can run soothing mist when attuned to water (regen) and also get a health boost just by attuning to water. The ele hits hard enough, don’t waste those points on power, use them for survivability, and I find that vitality points seem to keep me alive much longer than toughness does.

my first char to 80 was my ranger, and is still about the best for solo PvE in my opinion, not that it hits the hardest but because of the NPC stupidity of following my pet around while I plink.

however, once I hit 80 I decided to start my next character, an ele, and really have never looked back. Like you said, the d/d ele is about the most fun I’ve ever had in an rpg, it’s the only class I’ve ever played where you can really play all day and never use your main “1” attack… like ever. it’s awesome for PvE groups, if you plan your blocks and shields right it doesn’t matter if you take on 2 NPC’s or 10 NPC’s, they can all drop at once. Great AoE damage!!!

As I’ve gotten more and more interested in PvP I’ve realized the only class I have problems with in PvP and WvW is the thief, and that prompted me to start one. A buddy I WvW roam with often is an amazing thief, not shy of any group size he comes up against, and doesn’t run from a fight. The enemy of your enemy is your friend, so I would say whichever class gives you the hardest time in PvP play, that should be your next class. If nothing else, it’ll teach you how they think like they do (especially if you take that class all the way to 80 and beyond) and help you learn to defeat them in battle.

I would say the closest thing to an ele gameplay wise (for me at least) has been my mesmer (only lvl 25 so far). It seems it’s an easy class to play averagely (is that a word?), but a difficult one to master (like the ele), and once you do, they are really annoying in PvP and ultimately cause frustration in other players and do a lot of damage.

I have both, my thief I’m working on for WvW as it’s a pain of a class to defend against if it’s played right (although for WvW I prefer my ele). My ranger is the first class I played since day one and is still my preferred PvE class. I run a longbow/sword-warhorn wep set with 2 traps and a skill I didn’t try until well after lvl 80, and that is quickening zephyr (which is an outstanding buff to your attack speed, especially with longbow, and of course my sword, which will now do around 5000 dmg points in the few seconds that zephyr is applied just on my main “1” attack). Also, the sword attacks has a leap in it, so it’s easy to stick to the target if they try to run.

Most of my leveling time on ranger was spent with a longbow/shortbow swapping back and forth, but once you learn how to use your melee weps correctly with this class, you probably wont go back to just bows.

Personally I think the ranger class is weak for PvP and WvW, but likely that is because I’m not playing it right. However, with the pet drawing NPC’s attention it’s a great class for PvE if you can’t get some friends to run with you and you have to go out and cap all those POI’s solo.

I’ve taken my time and played many classes (I haven’t even finished the story mode on any char yet with all 5 characters including two lvl 80’s and my ranger at about 93% map completion) and for solo PvE ranger seems to be pretty dominant.

yes, it is specific to each character

I do use a naga (although I can’t imagine using all 12 thumb buttons), and it’s incredibly easy as you can pattern the buttons any way you like. It was on sale at newegg for $50 when I picked it up, so I got it. I have something that works for me with all my professions. With my ele and mesmer I use 8 of the 12 thumb buttons, my other professions I only use 4. I have my F1-F4 keys as well as heal and utility/elite skills on my thumb, everything else is vanilla. I actually still catching myself stretching for the F keys, which I had just gotten used to after so many years of using them in multiple games, is taking me a while to retrain my thinking, but when I’m in the zone it’s much faster.

SOLUTION: Although it’s probably still glitched, I was able to complete this quest last night. After doing some reading on the forums after I get the Priory guys to follow, only take a few steps at a time to make sure they are all following you. Go very slowly and make sure everyone is coming with you. It’s a little misleading when the storyline tells you to “forge a trail” or whatever they say, so the first time I did it I just ran off and killed everything and all the NPC’s glitched and didn’t move (except Trahaern who followed me everywhere). This time around I walked a few steps and made sure everyone followed… killed a grub or a thrall, made sure everyone was following, etc. You shouldn’t have to do this, but as long as you never leave the vicinity of the whole group it should never glitch out on you.

This also happened to me today. I am a ranger lvl 65 and I did die and respawn right at the beginning but Trahaerne never did. I made it all the way to the cave where you have to escort them out through the south tunnel. I cleared out the entire cave but the southern exit was blocked by tree branches or something. None of the NPC’s ever moved from the previous cutscene. I then figured I had made some mistake somehow so I went back outside with Trahaerne the way we came in and I cleared out ALL of the undead outside as well… still nothing.

What is supposed to happen? Are those trees supposed to be blocking the southern exit? I figured the same as getting into the cave, one of the NPC’s is supposed to blow them up or something, but they just stand there. Lame…

This is only the second bug I’ve had to deal with, but both have kept me from completing a region (like the skill point NPC in Lornar’s Pass that isn’t there) or progressing my storyline like this one…

really lame, please fix. Also, I’m sure Anet has their hands full, but c’mon, how bout a response to this thread? You guys were awesome quick to respond to things during Beta !!!

…last thing I need to finish Lornar’s Pass, although my launcher is downloading right now, so maybe fixed?

me too… there were about 30 people there just standing waiting for something to happen… hopefully Anet will patch soon.